The Art of Translation

[Eric]

Ee, by gum, there's nowt like translator-baiting. Makes a change from master-baiting.

Seriously, we have to analyse what Nnyhav is trying to say. First of all, I repeat: do any of you translate literature into English (or your mother tongue), or is all this bluster about "hypocrisy" (Cavalier Bizarre) just trying to cover up the fact that maybe you don't have a clue about literary translation, unless the theory is dressed up in cloudy terms by someone like Ezra Pound? (Read what Gentzler has to say on Pound and his "luminous detail". Ezra Luminous Pound. I found Even-Zohar's Polysystem Theory a much more convincing one.)

Nnyhav says that a concise version of what I say is:

"You shouldn't talk about translation unless you do it a lot, like me! Like you shouldn't talk about music unless you're a virtuoso! Or about novels, until you've written one yourself! So stop using big words that I don't get!"

Partly true, partly not.

Of course you can talk about translation, but as I tried to show with my football analogy, a lot of people seem to almost think that books translate themselves. Such people never take into account register, archaïcisms, colloquial versus formal speach, dialogue versus prose, and many, many other things we translators have to articulate in a split second.

However arrogant you think my reasoning is, you would imagine that a professional footballer knew more about playing the game than Stan the Can, who downs five lagers and waves his scarf. Or even that quiet, courteous fan, who had been supporting Leeds United for sixty years, but has never played football.

The use of the term "virtuoso" is a red herring. If you play the violin, however badly and screechily, you still have more insights into music than someone who has never touched a musical instrument. Millions of non-virtuoso people sing in choirs.

Many academics, teaching modern languages, are frustrated translators. But you can't make a living out of literary translation. So they work for the system, producing pointless papers, just to keep their jobs. When they are old and grey, they start translating again, and think wistfully about their twenties and the huge waste of time the past forty years has been.

As for the incomprehensible words, I am fed up of reading the outpourings of career-hungry academics who have latched on to the latest buzz word, be it "carnivalesque", "dialoguic", "heteroglossia", or other things nicked from that semi-understood Russian, Bakhtin, and shoved them into every essay, paper or article they write. Bakhtin himself was not always clear. People such as Holquist and Vice admit as much. And yet these university trendies squeeze neo-Bakhtin into every crack. What is the point of using words if you're not quite sure what they mean, because even their founder wasn't entirely sure?

Such academics always listen to gurus. So, Guru Eric, he say:

Learn a language. Only one. Learn it well enough to try to translate from it. Not to post your efforts up here so hoi polloi can snigger at your work and pull it to bits. But to get some insights into how bloody difficult translation (especially of rhymed poetry!) can be.

So, Cavalier Bizarre, go to the bookshop, get a French, German or Spanish primer, and get on with it.

[Eric]

Here's an article about the art of translation, i.e. about actually doing some:

Lost in translation? | Books | Jerusalem Post

The article makes interesting comments about, for instance, the Paris Book Fair last year and how some writers live off their translations abroad. Also interesting comments about translating Gogol and Oscar Wilde, censorship and sensibilities.

[nnyhav]

Originally Posted by Eric

Here's an article about the art of translation, i.e. about actually doing some: ...

That would be craft, not art. (One would think that some proficiency in translating might betoken some mastery of the native tongue.) Wrong thread. But an interesting article.

[Eric]

Nnyhav: this is why there are so few translations in Britain (I can't speak about the States). People start cheese-paring and hair-splitting about something they never actually do, or take an interest in.

Define, in simple layman's terms what exactly a) the art and b) the craft of translation are. The exact difference; with examples. I get very short-tempered with all those academics who have translated three poems, but have written hundreds of pages on such distinctions and then go on the lecture circuit to tell us translators what the artful craftiness of translation is all about.

Britain is crying out for more translations of more works, not more sterile distinctions. I translate real literature, instead of talking about it. Why don't other people? All they have to do is learn a couple of languages and develop a talent for art & craft.

[Sevigne]

Well, I think more people should learn to knit their own socks. All it takes is a set of double pointed needles and a skein of sock yarn.

The world needs more hand made socks. I don't think anyone should be able to discuss or wear socks until they have knit several pair themselves.

Ipse dixit.

[Eric]

This argument doesn't really hold water. A knitter of socks will inevitably know more about socks and knitting them than someone who rolls them in haste onto his sweaty feet. If the sock-knitter is really useless, and the socks don't fit, he or she will soon hear about it. The point being: if you participate in an activity, your theoretical knowledge will also improve. Theory and practice are intertwined.

But you still haven't actually answered my question. Forget your socks, and tell me and the rest of us exactly what the difference between "the art of translation" and "the craft of translation" is. I still maintain that the distinction doesn't mean very much, but has been invented by academics to pad out their waffly æsthetics courses.

[nnyhav]

Eric's apparent confusion might be cleared up by reviewing the thread, but a wilfully obtuse refusal to distinguish between literal translation and literary translation might impede further understanding.

But to extend the offtopical, one aspect of the JPost article I found interesting was the evolution(s) of modern Hebrew. A similar point is made in consideration of loanwords as social history.

[Sevigne]

A book I was reading today quoted Madame Roland complaining that her countrymen lacked "gumption". I was surprised to find a tranlator bestowing on a citoyenne a word more likely to be used by Annie Oakley.

[hdw]

Speaking as a translator with ancestors who were "woollen stocking-makers", I think I have every angle covered. Who was Madame Roland? - is she a character in this Balzac novel you're reading? If so, do you know what the French original of "gumption" was? Maybe it's a word which means ... umm, "gumption"!

Harry

[Sevigne]

Madame Roland was the wife of a Girondist minister during the French Revolution. The word gumption is Scots and much more likely to be found in the American South or Mid-West than in Paris.

[hdw]

Yes, but the point is that the word found in Paris, corresponding to "gumption", will be in French, so the poor bloody translator has to find some synonym or near-synonym in English. Having spent over 20 years editing a historical dictionary of the Scots language, and before that having taught English abroad, I'm pretty sensitised to the differences between English English and Scottish English/Scots, and I must say I never considered "gumption" to be part of the latter. I've heard plenty of English people say "gumption" and have seen it used in non-Scottish newspapers.

Harry

[Eric]

The word "gumption" is fairly widespread, I would imagine. I heard it used a great deal in Yorkshire as a child. Yorkshire is neither Scotland nor the Mid West.

Its origin is unknown, but it has been around a long time. One Russian (!) website suggests it is connected with the Old English word "gome" meaning to heed, and even to Gothic and other languages. In which case it may well be connected to "gormless", which, if spelt "gaumless", would seem to lurk in the same etymological area. See:

http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/cide/78166/Gumption

I value its being used in a translation if it indeed strikes the right tone of the original conversation. I would likewise be inclined to used the word "bollocks" (in the non-physical sense of "nonsense") should a translation I am doing merit it. As Harry suggests, we poor bloody translators (as opposed to whingeing, nit-picking æsthetes) do actually have to make choices, with which lah-di-dah translatophobes do not have to sully their lily-white brains. We're y'r actual workers on y'r actual coal-face.

*

I still maintain my obtuse refusal to accept that there is a real-life difference between "the art of translation" and "the craft of translation" if you are translating a postmodernist novel, absurdist short-story, or Symbolist poem. "Art" usually implies more original skill, "craft" more skill applied to something that will be used for something else. But Nnyhav fails to explain, and constantly refers instead to other people's unnamed websites. I actually translate novels, instead of Bakhtinianising the Derring-do of Leavisian, Boothian, nay, Fowlerian distinctions based on brio, flatulistics, and poseurism. When Britain starts reading foreign novels and poems, instead of using them as PhD fodder, Blighty will have become so much the greater, more honourable, and xenophiliac. (Ee, I do like a bit of rhetoric.)

[Bjorn]

Wasn't sure where to put this, so I might as well put it here. (The alternative would be to start a Dan Brown thread, which I simply refuse to do.)

Seems the world's publishers are busy translating The Lost Key, Brown's new mega-opus. Only his US publishers are terrified of the book being leaked online before the official release date, and so won't even send out the whole thing to publishers in other countries before the official release date. So what do non-English-language publishers do?

According to this artice (in Swedish), at least his Swedish and German publishers have chosen a rather... odd approach. They've cut the book into pieces of 100 pages each, handed each piece to a different translator, and given them a couple of days (a week in Sweden, less in Germany) to translate their bit. Then they paste them together, give the book a once-over, and rush it to the printers.

Now, given that we're talking about Dan Brown, it's not like it'll ruin perfectly good prose or anything. But when the Swedish publisher admits that he was very lucky to "find [translators] who were willing to do this", it doesn't exactly sound like the translator's role is taken very seriously.

Originally Posted by Monty Python

All through the winter of '43 we had translators working, in joke-proof conditions, to try and produce a German version of the joke. They worked on one word each for greater safety. One of them saw two words of the joke and spent several weeks in hospital. But apart from that things went pretty quickly, and we soon had the joke by January, in a form which our troops couldn't understand but which the Germans could.

[nnyhav]

I'd put it in the turnabout is fair play category, since the new name at the top of the pops over here (where translated books rarely hit the charts) is Stieg Larsson, translated under a pseudonym (Reg Keeland) since the publisher couldn't be bothered to have Stephen Murray proof more than 5% of his work: Books | 'Dragon Tattoo' fans, meet Reg, who made your obsession possible | Seattle Times Newspaper

But I must admit there's something a bit more ironic about the Dan Brown title ...

[nnyhav]

The Center for the art of Translation has a blog: Two Words

[Liam]

I recently stumbled upon a slim little volume by the poet Rolfe Humphries called Nine Thorny Thickets: Selected Poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym in New Arrangements, in which he admits having taken great, "if not monstrous" liberties with the 14th-century Welsh poet's language.

I know Eric likes to rail against precisely this type of "careless" attitude, but I thought Humphries' reasons were legitimate:

It is high time for translators to quit trying to inherit the earth by succumbing meekly to that tired old traduttore-traditore cliché, or the maybe-malice-made mot of Frost's that Poetry is that which gets lost in translation.

How much poetry gets lost in the King James version of Psalm XXIII, or Job, 31-34, or the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's? How much poetry gets lost, in our own time, in Housman's rendition of Horace's Diffugere nives, or, for that matter, in Edmund Wilson's translation of Housman's own poem for his colleague, M. I. Jackson? Good ringing prose is also what gets lost in translation--ask your nearest friendly Loeb Classical Library journeyman.

Translators should swashbuckle a bit more than we do. So here I am now, look you, a poet translating a poet, not some frayed but polite border functionary wearily exchanging the worn scrip of one republic for that of another.

The fidelity is due the poem, not its syllable count, nor its number of lines, nor the proportion of upper-case to lower-case letters in the Collected Works.... The cardinal principle to keep in mind, in this connection, is that your poet is in the same room with you, looking over your shoulder, or within call somewhere in the house, or strolling around your lawns and garden.

Having savored such "unfaithful" renderings of the originals as Heaney's Beowulf and Ted Hughes' Metamorphoses, I must say, I agree with Rolfe.


Cheers,
L

[Eric]

We can all wax rhetorical like Rolfe, but ultimately the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The only people who can really judge what gets lost, and what does not, are people who know both the source and target languages. Even between Britain and the USA, problems can arise, as an idiomatic American translation may be partly incomprehnsible to a Brit, and vice-versa.

Does Rolfe do any of this kind of comparison? Because to adequately compare the King James version with the Hebrew original, or Housman with Horace will require quite some knowledge of two difficult foreign languages: Hebrew and Latin.

I was reading some translations of Swedish poetry only this morning and noting that the translator had, in general, got both the words to mean the same, and, more or less, the rhythm and spirit of the poems right, too.

I instinctively don't trust the "liberty-takers" and those who rail against "syllable count and number of lines". These two factors are essential if you want to give the reader and idea of the sound of the original poem. Some translators are simply covering up for the fact that they are n[o] b[loody] g[ood] at translation. Some translators of poetry, on the other hand, are capable of sticking close to the original meaning and also doing clever things with the translation. That is the ideal.

People who translate from small, so-called "obscure", languages have to be very careful, conscientious and honest. Because they, of course, know that virtually no one can check up on them and whether they do indeed take "monstrous" liberties. Translation must not become a realm for charlatans and hacks.

[nnyhav]

Artful dodgers: poetry translation as thievery:
Boston Review — Jordan Davis: Exchange Rate

[Eric]

As Heidi says, the article was interesting enough, but I have one fundamental problem with that anthology of poetry, and things like it: too few poems by too many poets.

In the article, we read:

Among recent international anthologies, the most consistent reading experience can be found in New European Poets, a remarkable collection from Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer, offering 290 poets from more than 40 countries in about 330 pages. (The remaining 70 pages are taken up with contributor’s notes and permissions, which ought to give the reader a sense of the labor—and diplomacy—involved.)

When I read poetry, I find anthologies are a good way of finding poets I might like. However, given the statistics, 290 poets, 330 pages, this will mean that most of these poets will be represented by three poems at the very most. This gives no idea of the full range of a poet's work. It is a case of soundbite anthology compilation.

I prefer anthologies where the number of poets is reduced and where the number of poems per poet is increased to, if possible, about ten. This is an ideal that is not always practicable, but it gives the reader more chance to get to know each poet.

Once I've identified a poet I might like, by reading ten or twenty poems, I then prefer a collection of that poet's work only.

The permissions for this anthology must have been a nightmare to obtain. I have had problems when about 20 authors are involved, but 290!


*

Heidi wonders what she is allowed to do when writing or translating privately for her friends. We live in a democratic Western society. No one will censor what you put on a blog or in an envelope to a friend. But I personally don't see the distinction between translating for friends and for a wider public, except that friends can act as commentators and critics of your first drafts.

Payment is not relevant here. You've got to be serious about what you do as a translator, whether you are showing it to three friends or putting it on a blog where the whole world can read it. Translation should aim to get across what the original poet was saying, but in your own language. No translation should become too much of an ego trip for the translator. The translator should be visible and named, but be reasonably modest.